Microsoft makes it easier to erase traces of revenge porn

MicrosoftMSFT is making it easier for victims of revenge porn to remove images and URLs they find hurtful and embarrassing from Bing search results. The news was disclosed Wednesday in a blog post by Jacqueline Beauchere, the company’s chief online safety officer. Revenge porn refers to the practice of an estranged spouse or partner posting intimate pictures or other materials on the Internet to “shame” the other person.

Beauchere pointed to a new reporting page that consumers can use to register the problematic links and photos and said Microsoft will remove those links and videos, once confirmed, from Bing search results. And, it will “remove access to the content itself when shared on OneDrive or Xbox Live, when we are notified by a victim,” Beauchere wrote.

It’s not that Microsoft will delete the image from the person’s storage account, but it would eliminate his ability to create a shareable link of that image, a Microsoft spokesman said.

This appears to go bit further than what Google did, when it announced its plan to remove images from search results on request last month. Google’s web form posted July 9.

People could already report the offending images, but the reporting page will make the process easier. It is available now in English with other languages to come soon. Images will be removed globally, she said.

Microsoft Bing hovers at just over 20% of desktop Internet search market share in the U.S., according to the latest Comscore numbers. GoogleGOOG stands at about 64% share. On Microsoft’s earnings call Tuesday, the company’s chief executive officer Satya Nadella said he expects Bing to “transition to profitability” in the next fiscal year.

Continuing fallout from Nokia, slow PC sales, ding Microsoft

Putting aside the continuing reverberations from its $7.2 billion buyout of Nokia and the related $3.2 billion loss it just posted, Microsoft accentuated the positive on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call Tuesday.

For one thing, MicrosoftMSFT chief executive officer Satya Nadella promised that the company’s Bing search business will “transition to profitability” in the current fiscal year. Bing, which competes with market-leader GoogleGOOG search, has been a controversial business for Microsoft which has resisted analyst calls to sell it off or kill it.

But Microsoft stuck to its guns, noting that Bing technology brings important insights that can be applied to other businesses. The company maintains that Bing holds about 20% of the searches in the U.S.

Nadella also expressed hope that Windows 10, “just days away” from its official July 29 launch, “will return Windows to growth.” The goal, reiterated on the call, is for the new operating system to run 10 billion devices by 2018. For the quarter ending June 30, Windows volume licensing revenue was off 2% year over year; a reminder that for all its talk of cloud services and mobility, Microsoft, like IntelINTC, remains somewhat hardwired to the overall PC and laptop market. Which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is pretty sickly.

As for Azure, the company’s linchpin public cloud, and its other commercial cloud products like Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, the whole kit-and-caboodle is now allegedly on an $8 billion annual run rate. Nadella claimed the company is selling 1 million new consumer Office 365 subscriptions per month. He and chief financial officer Amy Hood also said the company remains on track to meet a previously stated goal to achieve a $20 billion run rate in that business by 2018.

Nadella said that the combined Dynamics CRM and ERP products already constitute a $2.5 billion business. Asked if Dynamics CRM can compete with a huge incumbent (presumably market leader Salesforce CRM ), Nadella said the opportunity is huge in a market that, below the biggest enterprise accounts, is very fragmented. Microsoft bought FieldOne last week to bolster its field sales efforts there.

Overall, however, it was hard to get away from the toll Nokia has taken. Microsoft had pre-announced a $750 million charge to cover the cost of 7,800 Nokia-related layoffs as well as a $7.6 billion write down of the deal based on revised expectations for that mobile business going forward.

Accordingly, the software giant posted the aforementioned $3.2 billion loss (or 40 cents per share) compared to last year’s earnings of $4.61 billion, or 55 cents per share. Excluding the charge, Microsoft claimed an adjusted earnings per share of 62 cents, which came in above consensus of estimates of 56 cents.

Investors were likely also dismayed by Microsoft’s MSFT commercial revenue, which at $13.5 billion fell short of expectations. Meanwhile, the company’s device sales fell 13% to $8.7 billion, while its equipment manufacturing revenue slid 22% as Windows XP reached its end of life.

Microsoft announced earlier this month it would write down its 2014 acquisition of Nokia’s handset business, a deal spearheaded by former CEO Steve Ballmer but one that failed to result in significant market share for the company’s Windows Phone devices.

Still, there are reasons for optimism in Redmond. Microsoft’s Surface tablets and Xbox gaming unit are showing promise, while its Bing search engine increased its market share and advertising revenue. And the company’s sales increased over the first quarter of the year, when it made $21.7 billion in revenue. That’s in part because the Washington-based computing company’s cloud business continues to grow — revenue from Microsoft’s cloud services, such as Office 365 and Azure, rose 88% this quarter.

Former Yahoo boss is jealous of AOL’s Microsoft deal

Earlier this week, AOL AOLand Microsoft MSFTstruck a deal involving search and display advertising. Ross Levinsohn, the one-time interim CEO at Yahoo YHOO, thinks his former company should be thinking like AOL — and wishes it had when he was in charge three years ago.

Levinsohn said on LinkedIn that “had we combined Yahoo inventory with MSFT inventory, it would have had significant impact in the market,” according to Business Insider.

He also noted that it was good for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, since it will get play across the AOL ecosystem.

But smart money is that Microsoft MSFT will be chopping more jobs, mostly from the mobile phone ranks. The phone business was folded into a new Windows and Devices unit under Terry Myerson in a reorg two weeks ago, with former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop exiting at that time.

So will history repeat itself? In an internal memo that leaked last week, Nadella talked about tough choices to come, so folks are on edge in Redmond.

The most recent headcount on Microsoft’s web site from June 2014 lists 128,000 employees; others estimate that current employee count is at about 118,000, which does not represent a net loss of 18,000 jobs. That’s probably because, much to Wall Street’s chagrin, Microsoft kept hiring in strategic areas, while culling people from less, um strategic areas.

Microsoft exec: Bing is a self-sustaining business

Under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has made a habit of shedding businesses considered nonessential under the company’s new cloud- and mobile-focused strategy. But, one business apparently isn’t going anywhere: Bing search.

That’s according to Rik van der Kooi, vice president of Microsoft’s MSFT ad business, who told the website Marketing Land that the company remains “deeply committed on the search side.” The interview came after it was reported on Monday that AOL is taking over Microsoft’s ad sales business in a deal that will see Bing replace Google GOOG as AOL’s default search engine for the next 10 years. (It was also reported on Monday that Microsoft will sell some of Bing’s mapping assets, along with roughly 100 employees, to ride-sharing startup Uber.)

Speaking with Marketing Land, van der Kooi painted a picture of a thriving Microsoft search business, calling Bing a “sustainable and standalone” business. “It’s a multibillion dollar business, and it does pay for itself right now,” he said in the interview, adding that Bing is an important component in a number of Microsoft products, such as personal computers and phones.

While Bing still trails far behind Google in the battle over search engine market share, Microsoft’s search engine is gaining ground. Earlier this year, Bing’s share of that market topped 20%. That’s a distant second-place to Google’s 64.4% market share, but Bing’s recent gains in market share have come with corresponding declines for both Google and third-place Yahoo YHOO.

AOL is taking over Microsoft’s ad sales business

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been on a tear recently, aggressively culling businesses that don’t jibe with his vision for the tech giant. His latest move? Shaking off the company’s advertising business.

AOL is taking over Microsoft’s ad sales business, which consists of 1,200 employees, the Wall Street Journal reports. All affected Microsoft employees will get the chance to join AOL, per the Journal.

Microsoft isn’t exiting the ad business entirely. It still has a stake in the game through ads on its search engine, Bing. As part of the deal, Bing will supplant Google as the default search engine on AOL properties for the next decade.

“We believe in the advertising model, and we care deeply about those services that are monetized through ads,” Microsoft Vice President for Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Rik van der Kooi told the Journal. “But if you look at trends in the industry, it makes complete sense for us to line up with AOL.”

Uber grabs Microsoft mapping assets and employees

Ride-hailing company Uber is turning to Microsoft as it continues to beef up its mapping technology.

The company is acquiring some mapping assets from Microsoft’s Bing search engine along with around 100 Microsoft employees, according to TechCrunch. These employees were responsible for getting image data into Bing, including its 3D, aerial, and street footage. However, it’s not clear exactly what the assets are.

While Microsoft has shown no intention to part with Bing as a whole, a fine-tuning of its products and priorities is in line with the company’s efforts towards creating a more focused business. As for Uber, the acquisition is far from surprising given its efforts to bolster its mapping technology. The company recently poached Google’s former head of its Maps product, Brian McClendon, who will oversee Uber’s research and development center in Pittsburgh, Penn.

Terms of the Microsoft deal were not disclosed.

Uber was also recently in the bidding for Nokia’s mapping business, HERE. It was reportedly willing to pay $3 billion for it, according to the New York Times.

Is Google cheating on search? New study says yes

New research claims that GoogleGOOG is gaming its search results in its own favor to the detriment of competitors.

Google has “increasingly developed and promoted its own content as an alternative to results from other web sites,” according to the report co-authored by Michael Luca, a Harvard Business School economist, Tim Wu and the Yelp Data Science team.

And yes, YelpYELP, which lists reviews of businesses, is a competitor that has cried foul over Google search results in the past. Perhaps more to the point, Tim Wu is a former advisor to the Federal Trade Commission, which settled a suit with Google in 2013. In January 2013, Wu defended the FTC’s decision to settle, writing that Google won search results because it was a better search engine, not because of its wealth and influence in Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. power corridors, according to Re/Code.

Wu has changed his mind about that, citing changes in how Google search works.

He told Re/Code:

“The main surprising and shocking realization is that Google is not presenting its best product. In fact, it’s presenting a version of the product that’s degraded and intentionally worse for consumers … This is the closest I’ve seen Google come to [being] the Microsoft case.”

Those are very strong words. In 2001, a federal judge ruled that MicrosoftMSFT acted in anti-competitive ways by parlaying its monopoly power in Windows into other areas of computing, namely web browsers. That judgement was thrown out on appeal, in part because the judge talked to the media while still hearing the case.

This new Yelp-backed research comes at a touchy time for Google which faces an antitrust investigation by the European Union. Microsoft might be happy to hear about another company feeling the anti-trust heat with the added bonus that if Google has to jump through regulatory hoops in search, Microsoft Bing search could reap the rewards.

Google said these claims from Yelp are not new. “This latest study is based on a flawed methodology that focuses on results for just a handful of cherry-picked queries. At Google we focus on trying to provide the best results for our users,” a Google spokesperson said via email.

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This story was updated at 10:28 p.m. EST with Google’s comments.

Yahoo to replace Google as default U.S. Firefox search engine

(REUTERS) – Yahoo Inc YHOO said on Wednesday it struck a deal to be the default search engine on the Firefox web browser on desktop PCs and mobile devices in the United States, replacing market leader Google Inc GOOG.

The deal between Yahoo and Firefox maker Mozilla Corp will start in December and is set to last five years, Yahoo said. It was not immediately clear how the agreement will affect Yahoo’s existing arrangement with Microsoft Corp MSFT, whose Bing search engine currently powers Yahoo’s web search capabilities.

Firefox had 10.4 percent of the U.S. browser market on desktop PCs, mobile smartphones and tablets last month, according to tech data firm StatCounter. Google’s Chrome browser was the leader with 33.5 percent.